I’ve been driving a rental car for the past two days, a 2005 Toyota Corolla… If it was better than my 1994 Corolla, I’d be pretty spoiled right now, but it’s not.
Lots of plastic everywhere and it’s actually more cramped inside… It does hold far more gas though, 16 gallons as opposed to my ’94’s meager 9.
Aryntha, Rai, and I will take it out this weekend and see just how well it does things like a phone trip…
I’ll be limping my car over to the mechanic near Aryntha and Rai’s place tomorrow or Friday after work so that they have a few days to work on it before Monday when I have to take the rental car back.
Well, I’m happy to report that my first encounter with Denver’s public transportation system has left me no major scars.
First off, it’s cheap… $2 to get from southwest Littleton to far-east Aurora, or $4 a day round trip. It’s fairly quick too; I normally leave the house at 7:00 to get here at iBeta by 7:45-8:00. Via the Light Rail and bus I got here at 8:15… Not bad really.
I’m also in a much happier frame of mind, as I wasn’t the one fighting traffic to get here this morning. Best of all, I got to read my book which is a rare luxury for me.
So, after all is said and done, I might be mass transiting more often…
I just got off the phone with the local repair place and it looks like I’ll have to leave the car up here till Tuesday evening. They don’t have the belt for it here, and it’ll have to come up from Denver.
Fortunately, barring any damages from the belt whipping about under the hood and me driving the car a few miles without a water pump, this little adventure will only run me around a hundred bucks.
Why do I get the feeling it wont?
At any rate we did get some gaming in for a few hours yesterday, which almost offsets the car-crap. Then last night we watched several episodes of “Firefly” which is really quite the fun series for those of us who are into inventive space-opera type things.
I’ll be getting a ride back home here as soon as Aryntha or Rai wakes up (noon-ish most likely) so I can do laundry and whatnot before enjoying some mass-transit to work Monday.
On the way up to Aryntha and Rai’s place my Toyota tossed the main belt… Fortunately there was enough battery power to get me to their place and the engine is efficient enough that it didn’t overheat horribly either… I hope.
The bad part of this is that it leaves me without a car for a few days, making getting back and forth to Sun a bit tricky, and it’s an expense I wasn’t really budgeting for.
Aha! A weekend! I knew I’d find one of these some time this week! 🙂
Now, what the hell do I do with myself this weekend? The weather looks like it will be relatively ok, which means I should get out there and do something. Then again I could just entrench myself in the house here and do something constructive like draw, write, or compose…
See, Jae is at work, so today will be an excellent day to be creative.
But I really want to be outside…
Oh, the decisions. 🙂
Then again, if there were a game going on, I could probably be enticed into that as well, which is one half “going out” and one half “being creative”… Probably a good solution, I’ll have to coerce someone into running a game this weekend.
So, here I am at work with an astoundingly light workload today. Nothing really happens till tomorrow, so I guess I’ll busy myself with research into some of the current project’s underpinnings.
I paid the rent last night and got the ok from “Wink”, our landlord, for the dog so now I can move forward with that plan. It’ll be nice to have someone to take walks with of an evening.
I now return you to your regularly scheduled web surfing…
It’s the beginning of another week… This week promises to be a bit less hellish than the last as I’m not ill, the project from hell has abated for the nonce, and I get to start working on a new project.
I enjoy the first few weeks of a new project because, well, it’s new.
Other than that, not a lot to report here… There may be more once I get to work.
I’m still ill, but I have to go into work… It sucks being the only person around who can do what needs to be done before tomorrow afternoon.
I’ll probably run these two remaining tests, and then head back home. Not that that means I’ll be leaving early, it just means I won’t be staying late.
Also, this is officially the sickest I’ve been in a long, long time… For example, the Advil cold and sinus I dug out of the medicine cabinet expired 09/04 and the Tylenol I almost took yesterday had been expired for over two years. Joy.
I’m going to assume the level of illness is due, in part, to living in “the big city”. It also has some to do with children I think… See, those of us at work without kids were the last ones to get sick, while the folks with children have already been out for 2-3 days with whatever this flu is, then happily brought it in for us. Bleh.
Oh well, have to keep that immune system up to speed I suppose.
And with that, I’m off to work. Have a great day out there folks.
Just got back from Aryntha’s new place… It’s out there, but not too bad. At least it’s easy to get away from people there. I also met the new roommate, though I can’t remember her name, but she’s pretty cool.
It’s a 70’s style place, kinda like mine, though with more wood and less open area, and a much better view.
Tonight’s theme was “the 1970’s” in honor of the house, and the festivities included listening to old 70’s records like Alan Parsons’ “Eye In The Sky”, Yes’ “Fragile”, and others; and a few movies on Aryntha’s *huge* TV.
A discussion ensued as to what the worst movie –ever- is, and several suggestions were bandied about – Great bad movies like “Ice Pirates” and “Logan’s Run” were tossed out, but I trumped them all with “Zardoz”… 😉
So we watched “Ice Pirates” followed by “Zardoz”, and yes, it is the –worst- movie ever.
Aryntha and I have seen “Zardoz” before and therefore have developed a resistance to it, but Rai and the roommate simply weren’t prepared for it: Rai started moaning in pain and clutching her skull after the first hour, and ultimately her brain got sprained which resulted in a blank stare towards the vicinity of the TV. The roommate was heard to say that if Aryntha or I ever pulled something like “Zardoz” on her again, she’d kick our collective asses.
Score one for us I guess…
For those of you who have somehow missed this cinematic masterpiece and are curious about it, know first off that it has Sean Connery and giant floating stone heads in it… Now take “Brazil” and mix it with equal portions of “Clockwork Orange” and “Mad Max”, toss in some “Logan’s Run” and a pinch of “Flesh Gordon”, bake well in 1974-era acid culture and you get something close to “Zardoz”… It’s special.
So now it’s a chapter in the current book I’m reading, then off to bed with me…
kungpaodragon, aka Aryntha, just called and it sounds like it has been decided that we are going out and about today… So now I get to traverse the mountains a ways to find their new place up in Evergreen.
I hope my POS Toyota can make it.
Anyways, I’ll most likely be gone the rest of the day. Local folks; if you need me, call me.
With things around Chateau D’Isaster coming back into sync, I was thinking this morning that I might try kick-starting my art again.
With the call from ZeZe out in Virginia the other day and the inevitable “are you doing art again yet?” question, and the fact I’ve got several pieces that other folks are wanting me to do, from back in ’02 when I hung up my pens to pursue this thing called “a life”… Well, I think it’s high time I dug out the my art box, set up my drafting table, and commenced to commence…
I know it’s going to be tricky getting back into it again… The amount of time consumed by even a simple pen and ink will pretty much mean my weekends are over. See, I’m not the world’s fastest artist – it takes me a solid day of just sketching to get a design down that I want to do, another 3-4 hours of ink work to transfer the sketch to Bristol and do all of my line weighting, and a day, sometimes two, to get the color done in the computer. That and I am a very sequential person; I only do one project at a time… I can’t have a room full of half painted canvases, even though with the drying times was telling me about with real paints it becomes essential… I’d go crazy.
Then there’s the fact I haven’t done much more than the very occasional loose doodle in over two years… I foresee a large mountain of crumpled newsprint and much “why the hell am I doing this?” over the next few weeks.
See, the main reason I stopped, and why I may not even get going again, is that producing art has never been a fun thing for me. Its work – and hard work at that and I personally just don’t get all that much out of it… Sure, it’s nice to be able to take things that live in people’s heads and put them on paper for the whole world to see, but damn, why does it have to be so time consuming?
So that coupled with the rather insane hours I tend to work, the software projects I do on the side, the traveling I like to do, and the 1×10^32 other hobbies I have such as writing, photography, drumming, music, tinkering with my car, computers, etc, etc…
See, I’m already talking myself out of it…
Well, before I can really get going I need to get another scanner. I gave my last one away to along with the computer and monitor, and haven’t really done much since. I still have my Wacom though, so there’s $500 I don’t have to spend. 😉
So, by way of getting started, I’ll be working on the colors for a piece I started back in ’02 for a really great person who goes by “Shira Ses’kai” online and lives over in Germany:
Well, I have finally christened the kitchen here at Chateu D’Isaster. After three and a half months of only occasional microwave use, last night I spent a few hours cleaning the dust off of everything in the kitchen and making my world famous chili – and it was good.
See, Carl moved out over the weekend, which was complete with the required amount of drama of course, and now Jae and I get to eat at home.
Last night after work I stopped by King Soopers and picked up about $150 in groceries, utility items (like the big stock pot for the chili), and other sundry items we’d been needing around here to make life easier. See, I had decreed that as long as Carl was unemployed I wasn’t buying anything that wasn’t a basic essential or requirement to try and prod him into doing –something-… Well, it didn’t work.
So now a few of the zillion cabinets in the kitchen have something in them and there are a few items in the refrigerator. I figure it’ll take a few months to get the kitchen fully stocked to where it’s useable without running out to the store every night for some missing item.
I’ll also have to go around and cut dowels for all of the windows and figure out better locking systems… Since we’ve been living here Jae has forgot his keys and broke into the house through a second story window one night (I almost beat him to death as I was here and thought it was an actual burglary), and now Carl broke into the house through a basement window yesterday while Jae and I were at work… And no one saw anything on either occasion. So now I’m worried that just anyone can walk up to the house, pry open a window, and load up on a few thousand dollars in electronics without anyone noticing.
I also have to change the locks too… Not because of Carl though, but because we weren’t given the keys to a few of them when we moved in.
So, other than those items, all is switching to a more sedate and relaxed atmosphere here at the house. Jae wants to do some cleaning of Carl’s old room tonight in preparation for it becoming Jae’s new room… I took a look in there late last night and… damn… I was wondering where a few of my plates and glasses went, and we need to call a recycler for all of the empty soda bottles and cans down there. But there’s nothing that a little cleaning won’t fix… Unlike the hole in the dining room wall Carl installed that I have to un-install here this week.
Well, I have to get my glass of OJ and head for work. Have a great day out there!
Well, winter is here again for a day or two and the roads are quite nasty out there. As Jae and I were leaving at 7am this morning, the traffic guy on the radio said there were something like 50 accidents around Denver… Just getting out of our little housing complex here was a nightmare and we made it as far as the gas station just north of here before deciding that we preferred living to getting killed on the way to work. So we called in and said we’d be at a minimum late and possibly not make it today…
Colorado used to be known for its multi-lane snow plows and having the roads clear within minutes of a snow storm… Now a days they wait till there’s a few inches of snow, then spray that car eating goop on the road and hope for the best.
It’s not working.
So, anyways, here I am at the computer here at home. I think I’ll try and get some writing done today.
It’s another holiday here at Chateau D’Isaster; with the roommates all off at family functions and me sitting here in front of the computer in a big empty house. Sure, I get the invites to the family functions and all, but I’m not family… I’m n+1.
Fortunately I’ve been doing this since I joined the Navy, so the calluses are fairly thick and I don’t really notice all that much anymore. The thing that gets me every year is that nothing is open: There’s nothing to go do out in the real world and it’s a thorny reminder that it’s “family time”.
Oddly enough, I’m usually looking forward to some time away from the folks here at the house, but my brain keeps going on with the childhood programming of “Christmas” and “family”… Bah.
Add to this that I’m not one for buying groceries as the above mentioned roommates always tend to eat everything before I get to it. So come Thanksgiving or Christmas when everything is closed, I usually wind up eating dinner ala gas station.
That’ll make ya joyous.
For those out there in a similar situation, the only thing I can recommend is too burry yourself in some project so that you don’t notice the second hand on the clock. That and realize it’s just a day, like any other, though one with a decidedly more consumerism base.
When I think about it that way I can get a chuckle: It takes the idea of free stuff to get most families together for a weekend… In that light I guess I can live without the family thing.
So I’ll probably fire up EQ2 and get engrossed in some 12 hour quest or something just to pass the time till I get to go back to work Monday and pretend like this weekend never happened.
Not a lot happened Thursday and Friday; just the usual routine of getting up, going to work, answering a few unsolvable problems, heading home, and then sleeping.
Friday on the way home from work Jae and I stopped by Microcenter; I was there to get a 1 Gig compact flash card for my camera and Jae to see about getting a new mother board and CPU for his computer.
Well to get the parts he wanted/needed it took a lot more money than he’d figured, so I dropped the $200 for his motherboard as a Christmas present.
Saturday morning Aryntha, Rai, and I went and got breakfast at our ritual road-trip breakfast place, then headed north to spend the day in Wyoming. No, no real reason and yes, there is *nothing* there… If you ever want to get away from it all, go to Wyoming.
So we bummed around for the afternoon out in the middle of nowhere then returned back to Denver. After dropping them off at their apartment I returned home and spent the remainder of the evening writing.
Today I spent the morning organizing my photos in Adobe Photoshop Album before waking Jae up at 1pm to see if he was interested in getting lunch…
It turns out that he got the wrong CPU for the motherboard I bought him Friday night and needed a ride back over to Microcenter to exchange it for something useful.
So off we went back to Aurora and he got something he could use for $60 more. From there we finally stopped for lunch/dinner at the Chili’s across the parking lot from the old Continental Theater. The Continental is neat because it’s one of the few 70mm theaters in the US (a normal theater is 35mm). Anyways, we stopped there to see “Ocean’s 12” which was ok, but not as good as the first one in my humble opinion.
And there you have it, my weekend. This week is only three days long and the company party is Wednesday, which promises to be fun.
So, having driven about 500 miles this weekend I’m signing off “life” early this evening, taking a long hot shower, and crawling into my bed.
Well, I took some of my Christmas bonus and bought myself a present… A nice new Olympus C-8080 camera… It’s really nice. 🙂
After the battery had a few hours to charge I got a hold of Aryntha and Rai, and we decided to journey up to Morrison and have dinner at the Morrison Inn…
Once we were full of some of the best Mexican food in Colorado, we drove a little further up from Morrison to Red Rocks Amphitheater for some long exposure shots of Denver with the low clouds that were in abundance tonight.
After an hour or so of peace and quiet we packed up and headed back down the mountain. I dropped Aryntha and Rai off at their apartment and then trucked across Denver to pick up Jae and deliver him home.
Well, between programming projects for work, programming projects for a few contracts, and the 1×10^32 other things I’ve got on the burner right now I managed to code my own LJ editor. So, this is the first test to see if it’s doing everything it should. 🙂
My day off yesterday was spent ferrying Jae back over to Aurora to have dinner with Jon and Jen from work. I was invited to attend, but it’s a family get-together and I’m not family. Meanwhile Scales was off at his family function and should be back some time Monday.
I went over to Aryntha and Rai’s place where we had “Wopsgiving”… See, Aryntha is of Italian decent and therefore is genetically predisposed to cooking on holidays, and he makes a mean spaghetti sauce. So we had spaghetti and garlic bread, and Rai made her world-famous toasted-pesto-fetta-french bread things which are really, really marvy. Oh, and there was much plum wine to be had by all.
We then sat around and talked about everything from Rai’s new car and early 80’s CD players to plans for the rest of the weekend.
So there you have it, my holiday so far. Chances are I’ll be out and about somewhere in Colorado for the rest of the weekend so if anyone needs me, call me, and leave a message as I’ll be out of range cell-wise. But I always check my messages when I get back in range.
EQII is *beautiful* to look at… Simply amazing. It’s really like playing a movie.
I guess it’s pretty neat what you can do with unlimited money and manpower.
Jae and I ran around n00b-island for a few hours last night, but didn’t get much accomplished because we kept stopping to look at the scenery, or the texture on something, or the model of something else.
We did make level 6 on the two characters we intend to play with the folks at work, and level 5 on two others (good guys) who are purely for seeing what the other side of the continent looks like.
The new quest system is really nice, and really frustrating at the same time. The nice part is that I have yet to have to mindlessly beat up bugs, snakes, or some other low level critter just for the sake of leveling… The bad part is that the quests are very in depth and really take a concerted effort to complete. When you have another person with you playing as well, this can get a little crazy.
So far the game runs great on my super computer, but not so well on Jae’s… He was perpetually having problems seeing something or maneuvering, or some other game function. I think he’s figured out how to get around that though.
The game does require pretty much pinnacle computing power. The x600 video card I have in this machine is “ok”, while the 59XX card in Jae’s box is “sub par”… Eesh.
Anyways, all in all, I was up till 1am playing EQII. This is amazing because I’m usually in bed by 10 a the latest. It’s that good.
And thus begins a new work week. Only five more days of PBJs and Mac&Cheese (chuckle).
The jury is still out on this Scales vs. School thing. I don’t think he’s put any thought into this beyond reading one of my past journal entries and saying, “Oh, yeah! I can go to school and not have to work”…
He does have his G.I. bill which should cover about a year of class, but the current plan as I understand it is to get a different loan for more and use the G.I. bill money to pay it off for a while. Wait till he has to pay out $500 for books which isn’t covered by student loans or the G.I. bill. And has to account for every dollar he spends…
Of course I have no actual idea of what he’s planning as he was missing all weekend again.
I have talked with Jae and we’ve figured we’ll give him to the end of the month to do :something: other than leave the house unlocked when he leaves, the lights on, run the heat all day, make a mess of the kitchen, roll in at o-dark 30 and wake everyone up, ignore his alarm clock for several hours each morning, and generally be a check valve around here. That will have given him 2.5 months to do something to contribute to the house… When someone I know has a 15 year old who can get a job after school and on weekends to help her family out, Scales can damn well too.
